Lost and Found
by Nenagh24
Summary: And eventually, he would thank Malfoy for pulling a prank that changed his life for the better, because you can never find something without searching for it first.


This was a gift that I wrote for lost_laputain (on LiveJournal) on the Radish_Love community. It is rather Fluffy and possibly cliché, but I had fun writing it and lost_laputain seemed to enjoy receiving it so I guess that's all that matters! Enjoy!

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter. If I did, things would have turned out much differently. Anything you recognize, I don't own.

**SPOILERS!** Harry Potter 1-5 (if only because you have to know who Luna is).

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**Lost and Found**

By: Nenagh24

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Harry sighed quietly as he sat down on the stair and looked down at his undone belt once more. He'd really liked that buckle; it had been useful in more ways than one, not only holding his belt together properly but with a twist in the right direction, it would slide out to reveal a small utility knife. Heaven knows he'd gotten into enough hairy situations to require that sort of tool. But thanks to Malfoy's little pranks, it seemed to be gone forever.

Taking another deep breath, the dark haired boy shook his head quickly from side to side as if trying to expel the pessimistic thoughts. No, he could get it back! It would just take a little more work than most wizards would like to expend to do it. Sure, he _could_ try to summon it, but with that sharpened end who knows who it would cut on the way to him not to mention how he would catch it once it reached him.

Thankfully, Malfoy didn't quite seem to have the whole 'casting silently' technique down so Harry was positive that he had used the _Viario_ spell, one which could only banish the intended target about thirty meters away from where it started. This was shorter than it could have been but due to the complex layout of the castle, the belt buckle could be on any of twelve floors and possibly on the ground outside if it had fallen from an acceptable height.

However, sitting around on the stair wasn't doing him any good. Having reached this conclusion, he stood and began to turn to grab the bag he had placed a few stairs above himself, only to be forced to catch himself as something ran into him from the lower stair. His faster than average reflexes caught the other before they could go tumbling down the bottom half of the stairwell, but he overcompensated, practically pulling the other down on top of him.

Once again sitting on the steps, or rather the exact same step from before, Harry blinked rapidly as he tried to regulate his breathing to a more normal pattern. He paused as the person on top of him sat back and spoke up, "Oh, hello, Harry." He looked up into silvery blue eyes which were gazing around his head as if following a drunken fly as she continued, "Have you lost something as well?"

His brows came together slightly in confusion even as he nodded, "Hello to you too, Luna." He propped himself up with his elbows on the step above and took a quick glance around himself before asking, "How did you know?"

"The Neuronnans have begun gathering around your head, in anticipation for a good hunt or mystery," the fifteen year old Ravenclaw replied dreamily. "And your belt is missing its buckle, did you know?"

Green eyes stared bemusedly around before settling back on her, a crooked half smile finding its way to his face, "I do believe I noticed that, but thanks just the same Luna." The frown returned though even as she nodded back serenely, and her own lips quirked up at the edges. "You've lost something as well?" he asked, recalling her previous comment.

The small smile slipped slightly as she raised her hand to her left ear only to stop just before she reached it. He realized what was missing as she let her hand fall back into her lap, but she responded anyway. "One of my earrings was missing when I woke up this morning. Usually I would wait for it to come back to me, but it was one of the last things my mother gave me before she had to leave." She never looked away from his eyes, only giving a slow blink once she had finished.

Harry felt a small spike of sorrow pierce the anger that had swelled up inside at the mention of her mother, but it only fueled the fire in the end. One day he was going to have to try and talk to one of the teachers about all of this thievery that went on in the Ravenclaw dorms. For such smart people, they could be overly petty at times.

But he mentally shook those thoughts off for now and focused on the present. "Well, could they be summoned?" He was almost positive he knew the answer but sighed anyway when she replied negatively. "I didn't think so. You were one of the first to master the summoning spell last year, after all. How about we search for them together? Two pairs of eyes ought be better than one, right?"

His sunny smile met hers as she nodded. It froze slightly as he moved to get up. "Um, do you mind getting off of my legs now, Luna?" he asked awkwardly, reddening slightly. The blond blinked down at him as if she had forgotten that she was sitting on his lap entirely before nodding amicably. Moving off of his legs by shifting down a few steps, she casually stood up and reached down a hand to help him up.

Hefting himself up under (mostly) his own power after taking her hand was a little difficult, but to do any differently would have hurt any manly pride he had left. Swinging down to finally fetch his bag, he then gallantly offered her his arm and they made their way up the stairs to start - or continue - their search. A small Hufflepuff passed them as they did so, eyes wide. Harry looked at her retreating back for a moment before looking back at Luna with a shrug. It wasn't like he cared much about the general populace thought that much anyways, who were they to dictate who he associated with?

The first room was spent explaining what his belt buckle looked like, and why he could find it useful - it seemed that sometimes she was more interested in muggle culture than even Arthur Weasley - and moving around a few of the desks, which seemed to have kamikaze'd into one corner. When their search was unfruitful they moved on to the next room in the hall, this one filled to the brim with chalk dust and at least seven rolling black boards but no earring or buckle.

On the way to the third room, Harry finally found a nice break in the conversation to ask, "Why can't you summon it? Earrings seem like something that might normally get lost easily, so there shouldn't be an anti-summoning charm on it."

As they walked she reached up and fiddled with the remaining radish. "My mother made and charmed these for me. She thought of almost every eventuality, even making precautions against my enemies. Having ones' earrings summoned out of your ears was a very common thing in the last war, I've heard, painful enough to be distracting." Harry could almost feel Mad-Eye Moody shouting his mantra in the distance.

"They're even charmed to grow normal radishes if you bury them, just in case I run out of food," she continued, walking through the door that he had just opened for her. "Even shortened their already impressive germination time to about two hours."

"But no anti-theft charms," the dark haired young man reminded, humored by the irony as he riffled through one of the desk drawers, the only piece of furniture in the room.

Luna looked up at him from the other end of the desk, pausing in the middle of her own searching. "What if she ever had to steal it back from someone?"

Tilting his head and raising his eyebrows slightly in humored acceptance, Harry shut the last of the drawers on his end of the desk and began to walk the perimeter of the room looking for either of the two items. He was just passing the window when something rather large and green caught his eye. Opening the window up to the chilly, late October air, he looked down at the pink tinged grounds below him.

"How long ago did you say you lost the earring?" he asked in an almost disbelieving tone.

The blue eyed girl looked up from her work and shut the drawer, "Before I woke up this morning." She started to walk over to his side of the room even as she stared once more at the space around his head, "Those Neuronnans are looking very excited. Did you figure out where your belt buckle was already?" Was that a note of disappointment in her voice?

"No, unfortunately. But I do think I've found something you might like a little better." He motioned for her to stand a little closer to him, which she did gladly as her school uniform did little to keep the chill off and he seemed plenty warm. Placing his hand on her opposite shoulder and moving his head even closer to get the right angle, Harry pointed to the ground. There, just to the side of one of the courtyards, was a large patch of vibrant green standing out against the other browning foliage. A house elf was standing near by, looking at it with confusion and, as they watched, pulled one of the large stalks out of the ground to reveal a perfectly ripe radish. The poor thing looked ready to tear its own ears off in confusion.

Twinkling green eyes turned to look into hers as he smiled. "I think I found your earring, Luna." The softly spoken words almost made her breath catch, but the fading sunlight caught something at the corner of her vision and she looked away, over towards the roof of a small outcropping about two stories up. Her head tilted slightly as she tried to get a better look and Harry attempted to shift his gaze to whatever had caught her interest. But the sun had continued on its merry way and the item was becoming more unnoticeable by the second.

A hand grasped his wrist as Luna, realizing his predicament, moved his relaxed but still pointing hand in the right direction. His distraction at the action itself prevented him from spotting it for a moment or so but when he did, he grinned. "My buckle! That's fantastic, Luna! How did you spot it?" She smiled at him even as he levitated it back over to where they were standing.

"Like most moons, I am good at catching sunlight," she replied factually, smiling fondly when the last rays of the sun reflected off of his glasses as he looked up at her.

Within fifteen minutes they had made their way down to the growing radish patch, easily passing any stray students as most were currently eating dinner. Harry rubbed the back of his neck as he looked down at the radishes, slightly at a loss of what to do. "How do we get your earring out of there?"

The blunt question didn't seem to bother Luna in the least, she simply knelt down before the small harvest and started pulling them out of the ground. "It should be the largest one here. My mother firmly believed that the best things come in large packages."

Harry paused in his harvesting, "Shouldn't that be 'the best things come in small packages'?"

The girl next to him just blinked as she stopped pulling the radishes up as well. "Why ever would that happen? How do you expect to fit it?"

Thinking on this logic for a bit longer, he opened his mouth to respond that she had a good point only to find a mostly clean radish occupying the space. His completely confused look must have given him away because Luna soon explained, "Now we have to find it inside of this. Or I could just use one of these as my new earring, but I would feel terribly lopsided then."

Once the radish was out of his mouth and he had spit the dirt that had made it inside out, Harry began to methodically break apart the 'largest' radish with his knife-cum-belt buckle. The work was more than a little tedious, the earring being about two centimeters and the radish being about thirty five long and seven around in the largest part. But the stars looked nice now that they were coming out and the company couldn't have been better.

Luna seemed to know every star in the sky personally and had no problem pointing out the interesting ones and telling all their sordid affairs. They had just reached Klom when something pricked his finger. Hissing, he pulled it away quickly and stuck it in his mouth to clean off the red radish remains and see the injury clearly. It couldn't have been too bad, he knew it wasn't the knife that had got him, but he had been applying a lot of pressure to cut up the ripe radish.

Assured that he'd live and missing the girls quietly worried gaze, he carefully cut the earring away from the remains of the radish and held it out to her with his good hand. He smiled she reached out, only to be surprised as she grabbed his other hand. Within moments her wand had been whisked out from behind her ear and the small cut was gone. Placing her wand back behind her right ear, she plucked her earring out of his still outstretched hand and fixed it back into place.

She gave him her soft smile and he couldn't help but grin, "Thanks, Luna." He shifted back slightly and leaned on his hands as the firelight from nearby windows reflected off of his lenses. "Looks like we both found what we were looking for, yeah?"

Drawing her knees up carefully, the blond wrapped her arms around them, leaning forward to rest her chin on top. Tilting her head slightly as she looked over at his open and friendly face, she answered with a sedate sureness, "Yeah."

And as she picked up her explanations again, both wondered if they hadn't found something better than what they were looking for in the first place.


End file.
